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T MAGAZINE; Send in The Clouds

By ANTHONY DOERR

Published: November 20, 2011

Like pretty much everyone in Ecuador, Roque Sevilla drives fast. I hurtle with him from the capital of Quito down two and a half hours of gut-stirring switchbacks, losing elevation with every turn. The sugar-cane and cattle farmsteads tumbling past on either side dwindle steadily, while the surrounding forests gain in age and power.

Sevilla talks the whole way. Slender, mustached and hugely energetic, he recites the names of tree species, describes different hummingbirds and tells stories about the foundations of Ecuador's conservation movement. ''I have been in Europe, Africa, Asia and North America,'' he says, ''but Ecuador - and I don't say this only because it is my home - is truly special.''

Sevilla should know. He is a former mayor of Quito and a member of the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund. He also runs the country's largest tourism company

At a fork in the road, signs present us with a typically Ecuadorean choice: Paraiso (Paradise) on the left and La Delicia (the Delight) on the right. Sevilla goes right. The air thickens; the road turns to clay and gets wet. Unbroken walls of trees scroll past. Finally we come over a last rib of the cordillera and drop into the white.

White, white, white - at first that's all I can see, not the jungly hills I've imagined, or the bright flashes of equatorial birds - nothing more than streaming curtains of cloud creeping up valleys, folding over ridges, veiling the world.

Only in shreds and glimpses do I begin to see trees. They pass us in ghostly walls, so close together and so diverse in species that the eye hardly knows how to parse them into individuals. Dozens of plants hang from, cling to or wrap every one of them - vines, mosses, ferns, bromeliads, orchids as tiny as my fingernail and orchids as big as my forearm.

This is Mashpi Rainforest Biodiversity Reserve, a recently formed private concession on the western slopes of the Andes, a last piece of Ecuadorean cloud forest at the southern end of what ecologists call the Choco-Darien biogeographic region. In May, the Municipality of Quito declared 45,500 acres of this forest a ''natural protected area''; that reserve envelops the heart of Mashpi, 2,891 acres that belong to Roque Sevilla.

The Choco was once an unbroken belt of forest that stretched all the way from eastern Panama through Colombia and Ecuador into northwestern Peru. Over the last century, deforestation has reduced it to diminishing islands; a 2001 report by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund found that only 2 percent of the original lowland forest of the Ecuadorean Choco remains.

But what islands they still are: places of gorges and waterfalls and pumas and tarantulas whose legs glow purple when they get mad. Here remain some of the least-studied places in the world, with thousands of creatures that exist absolutely nowhere else. There are cecropia trees that swarm with ants if you rap their hollow trunks; rare cuckoos that throw their voices; strangler figs that latch onto another tree midtrunk, drop aerial roots down to the ground and slowly choke their host tree to death.

But when you first stand in the mud of Mashpi, your mind snags on older, more visceral thickets. The frogs trill, the leaves hang motionless, the ferns drip, the clouds drown the light. Some long-neglected part of your childhood imagination rears to life. For a moment, through the mist, you almost see a brontosaur lift its head above the canopy, blink its big slow eye at you and chew down a leaf the size of a truck.

Fourteen years ago, Roque Sevilla bought these hills from a logging company, and now, in a clearing high on a ridge, he's building a hotel. Not just any hotel, either: this will be a supremely modern structure of steel and glass, with trellises for vertical gardens, an impressive staircase made of oxidized steel and devastating views. There will be 22 guest rooms, an 8-person hot tub, soundproof doors and a special film laid across the windows to keep birds from crashing into them.

''I want this place to be a bubble,'' Sevilla says as we walk to the hotel. ''As much glass as possible. If you want to be in contact with the forest, you can be out with all of the bugs and snakes. You can get as wet as you want on the platforms and trails. And yet when you come here, you'll be in the bubble.''

A short distance away, a crew is constructing an aerial tram from which four cable cars will glide like tropical ski gondolas through the tree canopy. As we look downhill at the first towers, the clouds tear apart, the sun slips through, and huge wedges of treetops suddenly begin to glow.

Sevilla falls silent, made reverent by the view, and beside him I find myself momentarily swept up by the force of his vision: guests will explore trails, visit waterfalls, stroll to the butterfly house. They'll drink blackberry smoothies delivered by cable car while they peer through scopes at sloths. Dinners will be made from local food; guides will give evening talks in hushed voices; endemic bats will drift past the windows